The Role Of Freedom In The Civil War

The civil war was a war that redefined America and reaffirmed that freedom was not limited solely by a person’s race. The results of the war echoed long past the final battle and forever changed what being an American means today. Many of the stories and accounts from this period helped establish the meaning of freedom and the struggles to understand how freedom applied to all people such as The Gettysburg address (Abraham Lincoln) and The narrative of Fredrick douglass. Both pieces discuss American views on freedom before and during the civil war. Fundamentally the Civil War was a conflict over the right to freedom-- which challenged a number of beliefs surrounding slavery, our Constitution and the rights guaranteed therein and to whom,
This institution had divided the nation like no other before it and had subjected a group of people to a class equal to that of mere merchandise in half our nation with no hope of redemption or salvation. In the excerpt of the narrative life of Frederick douglass he says “It is almost an unbearable offence to teach slaves to read in this christian country.” The hypocrisy being that the bible teaches us “To love others as I (God) would have loved you.” Yet the slave masters are whipping and killing slaves while justifying their actions through the bible. In that time the priests would say that it is fine and slave masters were doing it right. A powerful argument on the side of doing what is right regardless of the how or why would be found in the quote from “Across Five Aprils, “Slavery i hate. But it is with us, and them that should suffer fer the evil they brought to our shores air long dead.” (Bill Graham “Across five aprils”). This is saying that the people who started bringing slaves to our shores can no longer be held accountable so the injustice has been left to us to correct. Do we leave it, even knowing it is morally and ethically wrong or do we choose the harder path to fix it. So the argument becomes do we solve this as one nation or as divided
Abraham Lincoln touched on this very point when he referenced the founding fathers and their motivations in his moving, and pivotal speech at Gettysburg, “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” (Lincoln). ALL men. The founding fathers didn’t specify as to slave or free, white or black, yet the slave owners thought the slaves were just property. They refused to admit that the slaves had eyes, they could talk they could hear and think, some of them could be smarter than their slave owner! With one voice a new nation of traitors declared to the world “We hold these Truths to be self evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness..”(Declaration of independence). One of the main reasons our nation was formed as written in the Declaration of Independance was that all men are created equal. So, with the United States now stepping out on the world stage they faced a critical point-- do we stand by our founding principles, can we hold others to these same